In the performance of various industrial operations, workmen must sometimes wear gloves to protect their hands from abrasion, corrosive chemicals, electrical shock, heat and other dangers where direct contact with the skin would otherwise cause harm. Many situations arise where the gloved hand must be used in and around machinery and, unfortunately, painful and crippling injuries have been caused in the past when the tip end of a finger or thumb portion or palm or top hand section of a glove is caught by a moving machine element and the pulling action carries the finger and its covering and the attached portion of the glove covering the hand into the machine. This has always been a more or less serious problem for workmen, especially when the material being worked upon must be manually guided to be fed between machine elements such as wringer rolls where the tip end of one of the finger or thumb portions of the glove might fall into the bight of the rollers. Such glove-caused accidents seem to be more prevalent with machines such as rollers, shears, punch presses, wringers, crimping, drilling, milling, bending and others in which similar operations are performed.
Frequently it is necessary in the chemical and electrical arts, to provide gloves that give insulation against heat and electrical shocks and from reactions with chemical agents. Workmen in these shops may be required to wear such gloves that simultaneously protect the user against the chemical reaction and electrical shocks as well as from machine caused accidents.
Various proposals have been made for the construction of protective gloves for use around machinery as exemplified in the U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,686,316 to Linn, 2,923,946 to Nielson, 3,290,695 to Burtoff, 3,184,756 to DeLuca, Jr., 3,386,104 to Casey, and 3,732,575 to Pakulak. All of these disclosures propose to solve the accident and damage control problem by providing armor within the glove structure to protect the area apt to be damaged, from contact with the machinery.
These disclosures all basically include a conventional glove having a body portion with integral finger and thumb covering portions that have protection built into the gloves to preclude the machine parts from reaching the fingers or other parts of the hand even though the glove with the fingers and palm of the hand has been pulled into a position between the moving parts of the machine. The finger portions are not made to be separated from the main body of the glove.
Separable finger portions attached to a glove are not shown in the above, but separable wear shields that provide a separate covering adapted to be worn over the finger and thumb portions of a conventional glove are shown in prior U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,358,823, 1,358,824 and 1,620,444, all issued to Burden. All of these patented disclosures provide gloves adapted to be used to protect the palm and fingers of the hand until the finger or thumb portions become substantially worn. The Burden constructions all provide finger portion covering means adapted to be fitted over these worn finger portions to prolong the use of the entire glove means. The attaching loops on the stalls described provide for more or less permanent installation of these cover elements on the finger portions of the basic glove structure until the stalls themselves become worn enough to require replacement. The permanently attached finger portions of the Burden gloves are always present either alone or with their covering sheaths.
The prior art known to the inventor also includes U.S. Pat. No. 2,649,587 to Swearingen that provides an apron mounted on a spring frame that is adapted to support the apron on a workman's body. The spring frame normally supports the bib and apron in front of the workman but should the apron catch on fire or be engaged in a machine, the apron and its associated spring support may be removed in a fraction of a second since there are no strings to untie. The entire garment, together with the spring support, is stripped from the wearing when an emergency arises.